Courtesy of Bob & Lynn Fulton 

 
 WANTED: 

Storytellers, Essayists, Interviewers, Poets, Etc.  

 

Southport Village Voices welcomes new writers. A monthly commitment is not necessary; an occasional contribution is appreciated. We're looking for residents who would enjoy doing  interviews with Southport residents or writing about  travel, telling stories or writing essays, poetry or memoirs. Let your imagination be your guide. If you want to contribute but prefer not to write, let me know and I'll arrange for someone to talk with you and do the writing.

David Kapp

davidkapp@comcast.net

 

Mike Smith grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island, graduating from high school at 16 and from SUNY/New Paltz with a degree in education at 20. He was athletic but because of his youth and relatively small stature, he gravitated toward individual rather than team sports: fencing, track and cross-country. His first position as a teacher was with the Marlboro (NY) Elementary School, where he learned that the high school athletic director needed a coach for the cross-country running team.  

Mike & Karen Smith

"I took it on," he says. "They had no wins the previous year and none in my first year. The next year we won one meet, the next we won three of seven, and the next year we were league champions. The boys team didn't have a losing season in the next 29 years."

Karen Haeussler was born in Queens but she, too, grew up on Long Island. "My father died young," she says, "and as the eldest child I tried to help my mother, but she encouraged me to go to college, so I went to SUNY/New Paltz. At a sorority dance, I saw a handsome guy and asked my friend to introduce me. It was Mike, who was already teaching in Marlboro." After Karen graduated, they married and she took a job teaching kindergarten and first grade. She left her teaching job when she had her first child but later volunteered and then started a pre-K program in Highland, NY and taught for 25 years until her retirement in 2007.

When I asked Mike what motivated him to be a teacher, he said, "You'll laugh, but it was a movie, The Bell's of St. Mary's, with Ingrid Bergman and Bing Crosby. Bergman was a kind but demanding teacher and even learned how to box to teach a little guy. I was young so this was really motivating."  

The Smith family, left to right, Jennifer, Mike's brother Tim, Michael, Karen, Mike and Jillian.

From 1975 to 1982, as their children - Jennifer, Michael and Jillian - were born, Mike continued to coach track and/or cross-country, modifying those activities as necessary to attend to growing family responsibilities. Karen supported his coaching and his teams had increasing success. "In 1982, I had tremendous athletes and we won five straight sectional and two league championships," he recalls with pride.

"I emphasized academics," Mike says. "The kids had to finish their homework before they could practice and had to have letters from their teachers attesting to their class standing to stay in track. Many of them lived on farms and they wanted to practice; it was a lot easier than farm work. Remembering my own years as an undersized athlete, I encouraged dropouts from team sports to try track. No one was ever cut from the team.

I estimate that 65 to 70 percent of the track kids later graduated from college. Several of my athletes competed at the Division 1 level and four of them graduated from West Point."

Mike recalls a senior who had never won a race. "I asked the school reporter to interview him and take his picture. The kid proceeded to win his first and only race and had his picture and name splashed over the front of the newspaper. Twenty years later we happened to meet: 'Hey coach, how are you doing?' He took that paper clipping from his wallet and showed it to me. That made me feel great."

In 1987, Mike took a job as a social studies teacher at Marlboro High School, where he taught for the next 16 years, continuing to coach cross country but dropping track in order to spend more time with Karen and their children. When the girls' coach left Marlboro in 1996, Mike took on that job as well. He retired from teaching in 2003 but continued to coach until 2007, when his first grandchild was born. But at that point, he got a call from a former student who was now cross-country coach at St. Mary's College in Newburgh and who needed Mike's help. So he signed on to be his assistant coach and recruiter for the next five years.

Mike's daughter Jillian shared his love of cross country and in 2008 ran a marathon on Tedy Bruschi's team to raise money in honor of her Uncle Jack. Bruschi, a former Patriots player, is a recovered stroke victim; he spoke at length to Mike of his gratitude for his many years as a coach. The track community everywhere is involved in running to raise charitable funds, and Tedy's team raised $300,000.           

Mike's teaching and coaching career, stretching over five decades, was gratefully acknowledged by the Marlboro Board of Education, thanking him for "enriching the lives of the thousands of students" who passed through his classes and teams.

"It's been a nice run for me," Mike sums up. "Karen has been tremendously supportive of my career. My teams won over 600 meets in 45 years of coaching and many of my athletes and students from 35 years of teaching went on to college and a good life. Our focus was never on athletic scholarships. We tried to match kids with appropriate schools and to get academic scholarships. Parents often don't realize the difficulty of getting an athletic scholarship to a Division 1 College. Only three-percent of kids move from high school sports to Division 1 college sports, and only one- percent of those play for four years. The thing I'm most proud of in my career is that I got so many youngsters to try running and to see life outside of their little town."

Mike had a serious injury the year before he retired, and both his and Karen's fathers died young and never saw their grandkids. Mike's father's ship sank during WW II at Okinawa and he spent 26 hours in the water. He wanted to make a career of the Navy but got a medical discharge in 1947 and died of nephritis in 1958 when he was only 36. Karen's Dad died when he was 34, also of nephritis. These events and the desire to spend more time with their children and now eight grandchildren were significant factors in the Smith's decision to retire and enjoy a different kind of life.

"Mike was always so busy," Karen says, "that I previously made all the big decisions. But looking for a place to retire, we visited Southport and, as we left, Mike said, 'This is where we are going to live.' I was a bit startled but it was fine with me and we moved in as soon as our condo was ready."

"When I was young, girls weren't encouraged to participate in sports, but it was in the back of my mind that someday I would. In 2009, I joined a learn-to-run program and decided that I would run a 5K (3.1 miles) race. With Mike's encouragement, I achieved my goal. Now I do two exercise classes three times a week and play golf. I love being on the course and I'm in the Garden Club and I play Mah Jong ('Eda Stepper is a great teacher')." Mike plays golf and bocce and works out in the Fitness Room, and he's recently joined the Scholarship Committee. He doesn't want to be a coach anymore, but he would enjoy helping individual students in track. After a year at Southport, they are very happy they came and so are we.           

Charlotte Greenfield, in the K.C. Coombs School library, where she works with students to improve their reading skills. Photo: Abilgail Tremarche

Charlotte Greenfield was surprised and pleased in May to be named a "Citizen All Star" by the Mashpee Schools. Debra Troyanos, a Mashpee High School art teacher, initiated the "inter-generational project" to honor ten residents of Mashpee and to allow her students in digital photography to hear some "words of wisdom" from older people who have contributed in one way or another to the community. The students were assigned to make a photographic portrait of each All-Star and the resulting photographs were exhibited at the Mashpee Public Library in June.

The citation accompanying Charlotte's portrait honors her for reading to the students at the Quashnet and Coombs elementary schools but, as Charlotte emphatically explained, "That's not quite accurate; the students read to me! My job as a volunteer is to help them improve their reading and comprehension skills, not to entertain them, although we do have fun."

Charlotte's inclination to help others goes back a long way. As a sophomore in high school, she and another student volunteered at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown. And in her junior year, she went to a settlement house in the North End of Boston to play with the children who were sent there for after-school activities. (Maybe it wasn't totally altruistic; stopping at the Italian bakery on the way home may have been part of the incentive.)

Her desire to be useful to others led her to the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, where she trained to be a medical lab technician and then to work at Massachusetts General Hospital, Children's Hospital and for a private practice in the Back Bay. That work came to an end when she and her husband Dave Greenfield started a family. Charlotte "loved raising my daughters Debra and Joni." (And now she loves being a "Grammy" to her 11-year-old grandson Alex.) After her daughters were grown and on their own Charlotte trained as emergency medical technician and worked part-time in the Natick Framingham area.

In 1999, wanting to work with children and to help them develop their reading skills, Charlotte took a course with the Jewish Coalition for Literacy Volunteers, offered through Temple Beth Sholom in Framingham. Following that training she worked for two years with a couple of fourth and fifth grade boys for an hour each week, helping them to improve their reading ability and enhance their understanding of what they read.  

Charlotte and Dave Greenfield with Beth Wunder, who nominated Charlotte as a Mashpee All-Star.

The Greenfields moved to Southport in 2001 and in 2007 Charlotte picked up her literacy work once more, volunteering at the Quashnet School with third and fourth graders, sometimes as individuals and at other times in a group. That continued until recently, when Mashpee School Superintendent Brian Hyde came to Southport to talk about the need for volunteers at the K.C. Coombs School. Charlotte signed on and has been working with two second-grade boys in recent months.

Charlotte meets with her students in the Coombs School library. Her methodology is based on three principles: "Encouragement, Praise and Nurturing." She helps them to develop their vocabulary, making lists of words that they stumble over and reviewing the words with them. She teaches them to read with expression: "Get excited when an exclamation point pops up!" A little humor sometimes helps when the words aren't enunciated carefully. Just like the kind, nurturing Grammy that she is, Charlotte is careful to reward her students' efforts with praise and to make their sessions enjoyable, productive learning experiences.

A letter that Charlotte received from a fourth-grader she tutored in Framingham in 1999 attests to the effectiveness of her approach with children. It reads:  

A Gift of Words, To Mrs. Greenfield

The best memory we shared this year was reading very funny books.

I said that because you and I laughed together and had lots of fun.

Thank you for helping me when to stop at periods.

You have told me everything I need to know about reading a book.

Now I'm all set to be a good reader. I had lots of fun.  

From, Joseph    

Charlotte's portrait was created by Mashpee High School student Abigail Tremarche.

Charlotte was nominated as a Citizen All Star

by Beth Wunder, the former coordinator of volunteers, and the student who took her picture is Abigail Tremarche. She's been invited to continue her work as a literacy volunteer when school resumes this fall and she's eager to return. She'll also continue the work she has been doing for 24 years with the American Cancer Society and will take another class or two at Cape Cod Community College "to keep her brain waves humming." And of course, she wants make plenty of time for grandson Alex.  

Her words of wisdom: Knowledge knows. Wisdom listens. Make your choices and do the very best that you can as you move along life's journey."

• Do You Believe In Miracles? 
  If not, reconsider. We drive on Leisure Green and Southport Drive to exit the village. In doing so we dodge potholes, orange cones, construction trucks, pedestrians who are, themselves, busy dodging construction trucks. We skid on spilled sand, we drive through clouds of sand dust, we hump over steel plates in the road (which at times morph into gravel pits); all this while trying to be cognizant of the walkers and oncoming traffic.
  And no one has been killed! If that's not a miracle, what is?
• And speaking of Leisure Green... 

  once again the sidewalk on my favorite stretch of roadway needs mowing. Right now it's like a single file trail through a forest of weeds.
• After being assured many times 
  that our lawn sprinklers operate at equal strength and for equal time periods, I still think some areas are more equal than others. I know some areas are short-changed on time of operation and I can see that they also have nowhere near the strength of stream as other sections. Is it a prostate problem - or what?
• Attention fellow geezers: 
  My daughter-in-law Sarah, an otherwise savvy, well-educated, beautiful person of 40, has never heard the word, valise. We all know what a valise is, why doesn't she? When these young people go away, what do they pack their stuff in? Nothing but duffle bags? Are our generations so far apart that language is being lost through the cracks in the floor?
• Not only are valises and other words
  of our generation vanishing, but things are vanishing as well. Take, for instance, the wristwatch. Gone. Today's generation checks the time on their phones. No young person uses a handkerchief any more, either. They'll sacrifice trees by using tissues. And on the subject of timepieces, do your grandkids know the words 'clockwise' or 'counter-clockwise?'
• Here's a new definition of hubris:
  TV weather guys issuing a seven day forecast when they usually can't even get tomorrow right.
• We are sitting here on August first, still two and a quarter years from the next presidential election and the jockeying for the nomination has already begun. It's interesting that most of the commentary about potential candidates centers around who is most electable, least electable, who's doing the most successful fund-raising, etc. Wouldn't it be reassuring if there were some concern over who would make the best president?
• What is it about a British accent? 
  If you have a British accent you could repeat word for word everything I say, but you'd sound twice as intelligent as I. You could curse me out thoroughly and I'd probably admire your rhetoric. Does that make me an Anglophile?
• How long have newspapers been around? 
  A hundred years? Two hundred? Certainly longer than any of us has been alive. Look at the advances our societies have made. We've gone to the moon, we have machines that do our thinking for us, and we have phones that have no wires. We even have 3-D copying machines. Yet no one has invented newsprint that doesn't rub off on your hands.

I was in the first three grades of school at the nearby one-room village schoolhouse in the early 1940s. Until I reached age 10 I had few friends my own age to play with and usually ended hanging with older boys.  

They tolerated me most of the time and when they were involved in major mischief I tended to hang back for fear of repercussions from my parents, who had forbidden some of these alliances. This gang of minor hoodlums provided important degrees in my early education. I quickly learned that some boys were best avoided but others could be counted on to support and even protect a younger kid.

Our small village was bound closely together by the events of World War II. Many homes displayed a small banner in their front window, a blue star on a white field with a red border. A few displayed the same banner with a gold star. These were neighbors who had lost a family member in action. However limited we were in resources and however dire the concerns of the adults, it was still an exciting and adventurous place for a child to grow up. Children are often adept at gleaning the best from tense situations. Such was the case with my mates and me.

Aunt Minnie and Uncle Framus lived nearby in one of the few large homes in our close knit, mostly blue collar village. They were French Canadians, childless and in their sixties or early seventies. They were not really an aunt or uncle, but we kids addressed them as such. Their handsome, white, two-storied house consisted of two identical, six-room apartments. They lived on the first floor and rented the second. Behind the house was a large two-car garage that tenants used and where Framus sometimes tucked the nose of his ancient, battered, dump truck in winter weather. I don't remember that they ever owned an automobile.

Uncle Framus was short, sturdy, had a bushy tobacco stained mustache and was never without a corncob pipe in his mouth. His daily uniform consisted of an old cloth cap, wide yellow suspenders over a dark shirt and heavy, dark pants, which always showed the imprint of his knees. He had built a cement block garage next his house, where he did occasional auto repairs or just sat and smoked. His dump truck was available for hire to folks that he knew, with or without driver. The town employed him to haul gravel for the roads from nearby pits that he owned. On warm evenings, neighborhood men could be found sitting just inside the garage door on upturned buckets, smoking and discussing the war and politics. Framus was a good man, a good neighbor, dour, opinionated and narrow minded. My father often disagreed with Framus, but always respected him.

Aunt Minnie was also short and comfortably rounded. She always wore dark dresses with a dark colored apron, both of which hung to her ankles, and small, black, flat-heeled, sturdy shoes. Her gray hair was pulled together in a bun at the back of her neck. She was a kindly woman who enjoyed the neighborhood children. Her kitchen, which I visited from time to time on my own or on errands for my mother, was dark, warm, stuffy and smelled strongly of garlic, pipe smoke and people, a concentration of odors accumulated over many years. She was generous with her homemade cookies or a biscuit, fresh from her large black stove. Minnie and Framus were solid, dependable and were loved and respected in the village.

Aunt Minnie had an interesting sideline. She cared for elderly folks in her home when they were near death from old age or illness. In those days "rest homes" were uncommon and nonexistent in small villages. Families cared for elderly or ill members. It was considered a duty, sometimes a hardship, but folks handled it as best they could. Many families in our village had a resident grandparent who enriched their lives. Those without a family might seek help from good souls like Aunt Minnie. Looking back, one might do worse than to have her as a last human connection on this earth.

The result of Aunt Minnie's kindly profession was an occasional visit to her home by the undertaker. When the big, shiny, black hearse backed up to the front door, everyone knew that Aunt Minnie's latest guest was about to leave. As the hearse slowly maneuvered into place, several neighborhood boys would, with great stealth, gather behind Framus's garage, where we had a good view of their front door. We would crouch silently among the junk piled behind the building, cautioned with severe whispers from the older boy.

As two black-suited undertakers carefully carried the body out the front door, one of the boys might lose his bravado and run for home. The stout hearted would continue to crouch silently and stare with eyes wide. I seem to recall that we huddled closely together and we stayed that way until the hearse slowly pulled away, leaving Aunt Minnie standing on the doorstep with hands folded over her apron, her eyes following the hearse as it passed solemnly down the tree-lined road.

After the viewing, our little group would adjourn to the nearby woods and discuss death, dying, and the undertaking business. Our most interesting discussion, little buggers that we were, centered on whether or not Aunt Minnie might be helping her guests along to the next world. This, we were sure, would be easy, a little something in the tea or soup and presto, next stop the undertaker. Aunt Minnie would wind up with all the cash and jewelry. It was all very educational and enlightening, however; it did sometimes have an effect on my sleep that night.

Had my mother known of these escapades, my education would have been curtailed with a memorable tongue-lashing. I was a child of the village, always on my battered tricycle and later a two-wheeler, visiting friends and neighbors and looking for action. My mother, along with the other mothers, had no clue what I was up to some of the time. Wise woman that she was, I think she decided that it was better to ignore many of my absences. After all, she knew I was in the neighborhood and she knew all the neighbors. What harm could befall me? Due to the irrepressible neighborhood telegraph, if I was involved in something questionable, she sometimes knew about it before I got home to tell my side of the story. It was a simpler, less sophisticated time. My parents gave me lots of freedom and it made for an adventurous early life.

Roy Smith grew up in East and West Bridgewater, MA. He served as a corpsman in the US Coast Guard on the weather cutter USCGC Castle Rock and the icebreaker USCGC Eastwind, on voyages from the Arctic to the Antarctic. In his thirty-year career at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution he was initially a sea-going chemistry tech and later an administrator in the Geology and Geophysics Department. After retiring from WHOI, he was general manager of McLane Research Laboratories in Falmouth. Roy met his wife Cynthia at WHOI, where she worked summers while on teaching break. They moved to Southport two years ago and consider the choice one of their best. Since retirement both have volunteered at the Falmouth Service Center. Roy has charitable woodworking projects underway at all times and Cynthia is involved with various charities on the Upper Cape. They have two sons, Jason, an engineer at WHOI, and Aaron, a sculptor, and two beautiful granddaughters.   

SPECIAL THANKS TO

Mike & Karen Smith for their interview and pictures,  

Charlotte Greenfield for her interview and pictures,

Alan Gladstone, Andy Jablon, Jan Miller and Elinor Stoltz for tennis info and pix,

Lydia Biersteker for her photo, and to my proofreader Billie Kapp.